(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) The odds are good that 2025 will be the year of Bob Dylan.
With close contemporaries of the 83-year-old rock ‘n’ roll bard—including The Band’s Robbie Robertson, Kris Kristofferson and the Grateful Dead’s Phil Lesh—having expired recently, there is a sense of inevitable anticipation pervasive in pop culture that another living legend will soon fade.
Thus, the requisite legacy-making process has commenced, most recently with the newly released Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, starring Timothée Chalamet.
The movie is being unabashedly promoted as Oscar bait, following the success of past biopics like Ray, Walk the Line and Bohemian Rhapsody. It is directed and co-produced by Walk the Line filmmaker James Mangold.
Over the past two decades, biopics—and specifically those of notable contemporary musicians—have been the go-to medium for so-called prestige films, even becoming something of a parody of themselves. (Consider the blatant “best actor” campaign by Bradley Cooper with last year’s Maestro, which eventually lost to Cillian Murphy’s performance in the eponymous Oppenheimer biopic.)
Dylan himself won an Oscar in 2001, for “Things Have Changed,” off the Wonder Boys soundtrack—one of a litany of accolades that includes his distinction as the only professional musician, to date, to have received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Chalamet, 29, was previously nominated for best actor in 2017, portraying the victim of a gay, pedophilic relationship in the groomer-sympathetic Call Me by Your Name.
He has since become one of Hollywood’s most marketable stars, his waifish look calling to mind the sudden rise from relative obscurity of Leonardo DiCaprio in the 1990s—or, indeed, Dylan in the 1960s.
Long overdue Edward Norton, as folk patriarch Pete Seeger, is also likely to invite a nod from the Academy. Elle Fanning’s “Sylvie,” however—loosely based on Dylan ex-flame Suze Rotolo—may be a bit more complicated.
BREAKING THE BIOPIC MOLD
Unlike past biopics—including Reese Witherspoon’s best-actress-winning turn as June Carter Cash—the Dylan biopic does not paint a readily available love story. The romantic tension that it attempts to establish winds up with Dylan choosing fame over both the women in his life (the other being Joan Baez, portrayed by Hollywood neophyte Monica Barbaro in one of her first starring roles).
Dylan would go on to marry another woman—Sara Lownds—in an equally tempestuous love story that was touched on in 2007’s I’m Not There. His relationships following the couple’s 1977 divorce, including a six-year marriage to former backup singer Carol Dennis, have been more muted.
But in A Complete Unknown, covering the period from the Minnesota native’s 1961 arrival in New York’s Greenwich Village through the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, when he first went “electric,” the central focus is on the singer–songwriter’s transformation of folk music and subsequent abandonment of the genre as it grew more dependent on the cult of personality surrounding the performer himself.
At a pivotal moment, Chalamet’s Dylan decides to ignore the parable-preaching Seeger, instead heeding the advice of his pen-pal (and fellow future biopic star) Johnny Cash (portrayed by Boyd Holbrook).
Cash tells Dylan to “track some mud on the carpet”—i.e. sully up the purity of the folk-music movement, in order to create something new and unique that ultimately will, as history has shown, vastly eclipse the genre that helped launch him from obscurity.
Conflating the climactic 1965 Newport concert with a 1966 concert at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, England, the film depicts an audience member calling out “Judas,” to which Dylan responds, “I don’t believe you.”
While complexities abound in both of the plot threads—Dylan’s love life and his role in the broader cultural transformation of the 1960s—the underlying message is simple: The trajectory of a genius at work—which will lead, in retrospect, to the times a-changing—also demands that the old guard get out of the way.
‘I CONTAIN MULTITUDES’
Many in the so-called MAGA movement will, no doubt, scoff at the notion of linking a Bob Dylan biopic intended as Hollywood onanism to the current political climate.
As one Zero Hedge reader, thoughtful enough to comment on my recent list of the “9 Most MAGA-Friendly Christmas Movies,” observed: “There will be a million more MAGA grifters trying to Capitalize on Trumps [sic] win with their spin, especially when CNN and MSNBC go down for the count.”
Noted another reader/commenter, ironically named “Deep Reflection”: “This article is so stupid I am out of breath.”
The distrust and disdain for anything coming out of Hollywood is justifiable, and since the movie was clearly filmed prior to the Nov. 5 election, any parallels between Dylan and President-elect Donald Trump are likely unintentional on the part of the filmmakers themselves.
Dylan’s politics are as fluid as his musical influences, his romances, and even his biographical details. (He tells several of the characters in the film that he learned to play music while working at a carnival—part of his own commentary on the murky line between the public artist and the private individual, which he has consistently emphasized throughout his 64-year career, including his participation in a quasi-fictitious 2019 “documentary” produced by Martin Scorsese.)
Following his breakup with the far-left Rotolo, Dylan largely disavowed his own significance to the civil-rights struggle and other social-justice causes. But he has never repudiated left-wing politics altogether in the rare instances when he has tipped his political hand publicly.
He prominently acquiesced to a Barack Obama photo op when accepting a 2012 Presidential Medal of Freedom. And in 2020, Dylan’s eldest son, Jesse, released a flattering George Soros documentary, in which he characterized the corrupt oligarch as “one of the biggest actors for good the world has ever known.”
Still, as Dylan sings in a song from his most recent album (for which he just wrapped a three-year tour), borrowing a line from Walt Whitman, “I contain multitudes.”
The only thing consistently Dylanesque is the contrarian spirit that refuses to be pigeon-holed by those seeking to project onto him their own vision of what broader societal values he should represent.
VICE-VERSA ON VISAS
In the aftermath of Trump’s historic re-election, recent fissures in the MAGA movement now seem to be mirroring the 1960s folk scene. With the order a-rapidly fading, some of the very people who elected a political disruptor to do their bidding may experience buyer’s remorse.
Following the recent suggestion by Trump megadonor Elon Musk that the country needed to expand its H1-B skilled-worker visa program, X users erupted, many of them Trump supporters who slammed the tech entrepreneur for undermining one of the central tenets of the “America First” platform.
Unlike leftist open-border policies—which have gone fully off the deep-end during the Biden administration, making rational dialogue and compromise an impossibility—both sides have made valid points for and against the expansion of the HB-1 visa program.
Proponents note the overall reliance on foreign labor in elite jobs where America has long since yielded its competitive edge due to cultural rot and declines in the education system.
Some, on the other hand, have pointed out rampant abuse of the H1-B system has allowed foreign labor into the U.S. to perform highly skilled jobs such as janitorial work. They further argue that allowing foreign labor to undercut U.S. workers in pursuit of high-level jobs is the root cause of the problem, as it has disincentivized Americans from pursuing them.
With longtime Trump adviser and thought-leader Steve Bannon among those leading the charge (after X appeared to deplatform right-wing activist–journalist Laura Loomer), Musk was forced unexpectedly onto the defensive.
Bannon called for the total eradication of the skilled-worker program, saying “The H-1B visa program is a total and complete scam concocted by the Lords of Easy Money on Wall Street and the oligarchs in Silicon Valley,” according to Mediaite.
By Saturday, the infighting had appeared to turn vicious as the public debate raged. Musk—the world’s richest man, a legal immigrant and a red-pilled, come-lately Trump supporter—used himself as an example to put immigration policy into perspective.
The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B.
Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot…
— Kekius Maximus (@elonmusk) December 28, 2024
A poll by former Trump spokesman Sean Spicer, now a Newsmax personality, suggested that X users favored calls to end the program by a roughly two-to-one margin.
Lets settle this
H1B Visas:
— Sean Spicer (@seanspicer) December 29, 2024
Musk, who conceded that the program was in need of reform, also made the case, however, that many of those who were voicing their opinions had, at best, limited knowledge of the nuances surrounding the issue.
Dunning-Kruger effect has entered the chat. pic.twitter.com/3tvlW6ZmfF
— Brick Suit (@Brick_Suit) December 26, 2024
Trump—who had a mixed record of restricting the H1-B program during his first term while advocating for it in at least one discussion on the 2024 campaign trail—weighed in on the side of Musk, telling the New York Post in an interview that he had always favored it.
“I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas. That’s why we have them,” Trump said.
“I have many H-1B visas on my properties,” he continued. “I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program.”
GENUISES AT WORK?
On the heels of another heated discussion recently over Congress’s continuing resolution to fund the government, which saw many break with Trump over an increase of the debt ceiling (and his support for House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La.), the H1-B debate made one thing clear: There will be no easy answers and simple solutions for Trump to placate the idealogically diverse coalition of supporters who swept him back in to power.
But the MAGA purists in Bannon’s camp must bear in mind that the very reason Trump has been a transformative figure in American politics is his willingness to ruffle feathers and go against the grain.
Trump assuredly will attempt to keep his promises with regard to the mass deportation of illegal immigrants—particularly those who have continued to violate U.S. laws. His success in this area will depend on the extent to which the GOP base—and the public at large—supports him.
Yet, those expecting him to adhere to a reductivist immigration agenda that would hinder American economic strength on the world stage have not been paying very close attention.
Undoubtedly, Trump will come out in favor of whatever gives America the most competitive edge, with the long-range view that economic domination will boost public morale, restore America’s identity as a global superpower, and empower citizens to better themselves in service of the broader national objectives.
As with the folk-music faction who felt betrayed by Dylan’s defection to rock ‘n’ roll, the paradigm shift that Trump’s macroscopic vision requires may seem to some like betrayals of the core causes for which they supported him.
But for the former Manhattan real-estate mogul, the first step in building something as monumental as Trump Tower requires tracking a little bit of mud on the carpet.
Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/realbensellers.
